Development Site

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT DEVELOPMENT SITE - PAGE 3

By Lorraine Mirabella and Lorraine Mirabella,lorraine.mirabella@baltsun.com | November 19, 2009

Baltimore's first Lowe's home improvement store and a supermarket would anchor a $65 million mixed-use project straddling Charles Village and Remington under a retail developer's plans to transform the site of Anderson Automotive, a fixture since the mid-1950s. Developer Rick Walker unveiled plans Wednesday to build the home improvement store and a grocer, along with 32,000 square feet of specialty shops and up to 60 apartments on 11 acres roughly bounded by 25th Street to the north, Maryland Avenue to the east, 24th Street to the south and the CSX rail line to the west.

The court of mixed public opinion about a planned shopping center in Remington is in full fact-finding and soul-searching modes this week. Developers of 25th Street Station are going back before several community groups and a key city panel with proposed changes that they say would make the center and its centerpiece, a 104,000-square-foot Walmart store, more pedestrian-friendly and easier on the eye. Also, a Baltimore City councilman is...

The Inn at the Black Olive, a 12-suite boutique hotel in Fells Point known for eco-friendly amenities, will be offered for sale at a foreclosure auction Thursday. An auction by Alex Cooper Auctioneers Inc. is slated for 9 a.m. at the South Caroline Street site of the two-year-old inn, which touts features such as organic bedding and towels, harbor-view balconies and spa bathrooms with aqua-therapy tubs. The inn is owned by the Spiliadis family, which operates the Black Olive Restaurant on Bond Street, also in Fells Point.

A Baltimore City-mandated citizens' advisory committee that few people knew existed until this month scrambled to meet Saturday, ahead of a Monday deadline to make recommendations to the Planning Department about a proposed shopping center with a Walmart store in Remington. Although 15 area residents attended the meeting at Corky's Grill near the development site, only two were committee members, so the five-member committee lacked a quorum and can only issue "a report of those present," said John Viles, who chaired the meeting.

Defying Mayor Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake and city redevelopment officials, Baltimore's preservation commission voted Tuesday to add the former Read's drugstore to the city's "special list" of landmarks, an action that protects the building from demolition for at least six months. Baltimore's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation voted 7-1 to grant temporary landmark status to the city-owned building because it was the site of a 1955 lunch counter sit-in that had national significance in the U.S. civil rights movement.

The developers of the new Cobblestone development in th Owings Mills area had this problem: How do you fit 118 houses on a development site that normally would accommodate only 80?Talles Homes' solution: a site-development plan called Z-lot. The luxury homes are placed on narrow 6,000-square-foot lots with staggered placements of L-shaped side yards.On a Z-lot, the space around the house zigzags like the letter Z, and even though the houses are close together, there are windows on all four sides.

Just when North Laurel and Savage residents were foreseeing a breakthrough in their communities with new schools and an expected shopping center, they're being hit with the one thing many say they hate most -- a Columbia-style neighborhood -- right in their back yards."

Plans to build 51 pricey homes on both sides of the Northern Central Railroad bike trail north of Parkton have moved a step closer to construction after the Board of Appeals rejected community objections to the project.The Cameron Mill Partnership would erect the $300,000-to- $500,000 homes on 3-acre lots above the Little Falls and Beetree Run, with road access from Cameron Mill, Stablers Church and Eagle Mill roads.The sites, on two wooded ridges and one recently farmed hillside, overlook a pretty, bowl-shaped stream valley now occupied by a single small farmhouse and barn, which is to remain.

Baltimore County planners want to allow hundreds of houses on waterfront conservation land along the Bird River in Middle River, over the strong objections of environmental regulators. Some county officials say a proposal for up to 400 homes where only three are now allowed would defeat the purpose of multimillion-dollar public investments in natural resource protection and would represent an unprecedented expansion into an area where the county has restricted growth since 1967. Joseph Stamato, owner of Verus Development LLC, the company that wants to develop the site, said "we're protecting the land" by using only about half of the 292 acres of woods and fields.